We’ve spent much of this Spring deliberately flying under the radar, clad in ghillie suits and face paint, sitting hunched over our laptops furiously typing up investment documents while trading shifts on lookout duty. As it turns out, some of the less glamorous aspects of starting a business are also ones that can’t really be publicized to any real degree in the first place. But now that the fog of war legalese has begun to dissipate, we’ve accumulated a number of newsworthy items to share. It’s a little bit of everything, really.
Our funding push is coming to a close, with a good portion of the necessary capital raised. We’re shooting to order our equipment in a few weeks, so I’m sure we’ll have more to say about that whole bit as it begins to fall into place.
While all of the clandestine business-y things are being taken care of, the beer has begun to flow once again. The purgatory of licensing downtime has come to an end, and we’re back to brewing with state license in hand. It’s not actually in our hand when we’re brewing, because it’s a piece of paper. But we’ve obtained it, and that means that The Brew Gentlemen Beer Co. is now legally allowed to make and sell beer.
To that end, we’ve been brewing batches of White Sky and General Braddock’s IPA while testing out some recipes for session beers: Business Casual, our red ale, and a yet-to-be named American bitter (ish) that Matt and Zach are making primarily for the purpose of having something they can start drinking at 10am on brew days. Sorachi Ace and Northern Brewer hops, and a mild 3.6% ABV.
Obviously beers require identities as well, and on that front we’ve spent a good deal of time over at TechShop prototyping some new taphandles for White Sky and General Braddock’s. Although these are still in development and the materials are different from the final product, things look good. Our eventual goal is to partner with TechShop to easily and efficiently make all of our taphandles by hand. In order for that to happen, though, we need to make them resilient enough to be bar-proof… eh, we’ll figure it out.
With our ability to hustle newly reinstated, the beginning of the summer is already looking damned busy. Here’s a look at a few upcoming events we’re involved with:
- The grand opening of The Hardware Store, a new coworking space by Mt. Washington, is this Friday (June 7th) at 7pm. We’ll be in attendance doing our two favorite activities: serving beer and hanging out with folks who are working on awesome projects. It’s great to see more entrepreneurship and startup focused workspaces popping up around Pittsburgh, and we’re extremely happy to be able to be a part of it. More details for Friday’s launch party are available via Built in PGH.
- The summer Tapped series is officially back in swing beginning June 22nd. These pop-up celebrations of Pittsburgh’s neighborhoods kick off with Tapped: East Liberty, and will feature local beer and food trucks. This is a special Tapped event for us, as it will be the first (hopefully of very, very many) that we’ll be able to legally sell beer at. This will have it’s own blog post, so keep an eye out for more info within the next few days.
- We have some events in the planning stages in collaboration with Rick Easton, the prodigal artisanal baker and bread-whisperer behind Bread and Salt. The plan is to hold pizza and beer nights at the brick oven in Braddock throughout the summer, both for the community and anyone that wants to schlep on down for a nice casual evening. We’ll be moving out to Braddock in a few months, and can’t wait to start doing some awesome events in our own backyard.
So that’s about it. Everything is really starting to move again. More beer, more events, and soon we’ll be able to do more work on the building. Which mean’s we’ll be able to work with the obscenely talented Tony Purcell once again on our new mural – all we’ll say is that we have a LOT more surface area than we had for this one:
